All the poor kids in South Pasadena lived in the Raymond Hill district. Immigrants and the POC who were not East Asian, because they also lived in the rich white areas. There were burglaries constantly, the sound of car alarms going off at all hours, police making their rounds at every odd hour. Everyone was wearing the wrong thing in this area — bad shorts and bad T-shirts, knockoff sneakers, budget gear. Everyone had bad haircuts, bad attitudes. All of us walked to and from school — this was an area for kids who had the keys to their house when they were still single digits, who barely knew their parents growing up because they worked so many jobs, who learned how to babysit when they were still babies as the siblings came in. This was the kind of area you wanted so badly to leave one day. It bred aspiration that way while the rest of South Pasadena was a wonderland everyone was a forever-citizen of; they all came back, but not the Raymond Hill kids, if we could help it. We were scared of the few white people who were our neighbors; anyone who was white who lived there had definitely done something extremely wrong in life. I made out with boys in their cars, made sure they parked uphill so my parents couldn’t somehow spy us from their bedroom window, worrying about why I was late. When it came time to leave, I went as far as possible, 3,000 miles away, and when I came back to visit, the greatest compliment I received was New York had really changed me.